Sharing Grafton & Grossmann’s Blog on Harvard Report

This is a photo that allows you the viewer the vantage point of looking from the University of Ottawa over the Rideau Canal and onto the city of Ottawa.

Happy Canada Day from Vancouver with the nation’s capital in mind!

My post today is a set of snippets from a blog post I just saw circulated around Facebook. I like the post. I have lots of comments and questions. But I also have a Canada celebration to get to so for now, I leave you the link to the post, the last line of the post, and two comments from the comment feed at the bottom.

Overview: Harvard wrote a report about the vivacity or lack thereof of humanities majors. Grafton and Grossman write this blog post in response to the media interpretations that have come out as a result. They see value in the humanities degree. They see that this sort of knowledge can be applied widely in and outside of academia. They give hope.

From the post: “Have you heard about the professor of neurology who, as a student, learned to do research by writing a prize-winning senior thesis in history on the death of Captain Cook? No, of course you haven’t. But he exists, too, and so do thousands more. They live all over the country, and they work in all sorts of jobs. We need to learn more about what they are doing and how their humanities education has played a continuing role in their lives. Counting won’t get us where we have to go. We need to talk, and even more, we need to listen.”

From the comment feed:

Commenter “sciencegrad” wrote: “This, I think, is why we need a discussion of how studying humanities has helped people. as the author suggests. We need anecdotes here in order to convince people to give them a shot.”

Commenter “mycantarella” wrote: “What many, if not most, faculty lack is that ability to share with students the ways that the skills they acquire across disciplines will be highly relevant in the workplace — as they always have been.”